Feld On Focus
The day after I wrote about doing chicken and doing chicken right, Brad Feld over at FeldThoughts.com wrote about something very similar. In a post titled Lack of Focus, Feld—a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital—makes a compelling case for entrepreneurs like myself to focus and not deviate too far from our initial plan. Feld writes:
When we started Martingale Software in 1984, our original vision was “to write software for the new Apple Macintosh.†That was pretty broad, so as we sat around in a classroom somewhere at MIT (because it had a nice big blackboard that we could scribble on, plus it made us feel grown up), we decided to narrow our focus. After many hours (or was it minutes?) of discussion, we decided we would write “graphics software for the new Apple Macintosh.â€
We quickly got distracted. One of my early mentors – Gene Scott (who also happened to be our investor – he put up the initial $10,000 for Martingale) – was the founder and chairman of Scott Instruments – a voice recognition software company in Denton, Texas. Scott Instruments … asked us to write an application for the VET/2 for the Macintosh – we couldn’t resist so we had our first contract. … Of course, this had nothing to do with our vision for Martingale. I’m sure we rationalized this by thinking something like “we’ve got to eatâ€â€¦
Several months later…we met a local investment management company… They wanted us to do some spreadsheet / graphics stuff for them. Ok – graphics – a little closer. But – they used PCs. So – we rationalized again, went out and bought a Compaq Luggable, and did some more consulting work.
Between school, our “extra curricular activitiesâ€, and our two contracts, we never wrote much graphics software for the Mac… The contracts enabled us to “be in business†for a while, but they had nothing to do with the business we set out to create. While the work enabled “survivalâ€, our complete lack of focus (among many other things) contributed to our ultimate demise.
Click here for Feld’s post in its entirety (not terribly different from what I copied and pasted above).
Fortunately, for those of us who started Doba, we’ve never strayed from our original vision. Today, Doba has thousands of customers, and I attribute that success largely to our doggedly savvy determination to do chicken and do chicken right. While that’s not to say that we’ll never serve side dishes with our brand of chicken, you can pretty much bet the farm that we’ll never be a company that offers up beefsteak or lamb chops!
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